CASE STUDY INDUSTRIAL ARTS BREWING AARON HAND | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The Art of Scaling Up a Hazy IPA Industrial Arts Brewing, a young craft brewer in New York’s Hudson Valley, was maxing out the capacity of its 25 hL brewhouse. A second, larger brewhouse from Krones Steinecker was highly customized to handle its hoppy brew.
PHOTO COURTESY OF LIAM GOODMAN
The high volume of hops used to make Industrial Arts’ hazy IPA required some innovative thinking to optimize brewing.
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NDUSTRIAL ARTS BREWING began operations in the summer of 2016—in a sprawling pre-Civil War complex along the Hudson River in Garnerville, NY. “We were aiming to be a New York City area supplier of really fresh, hoppy beer. We stumbled on a hazy IPA as our flagship, and that’s sort of driven what we do,” says Jeff O’Neil, Industrial Arts founder and owner. The brewery’s Wrench IPA has had great success in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “The fundamental difference between ours and a lot of the other ones that we’ve tried is ours is really dry and well fermented and has a decent amount of bitterness.” The Garnerville plant operates with a 25 hL brewhouse from BrauKon and 100-barrel fermenters. Though happy with the operation of the brewhouse, they were quickly running out of capacity. “We do our best to fill those fermenters. We brew
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high-gravity wort and dilute it in the whirlpool—we do everything that we can to max out the capacity there,” O’Neil says. “We’ve grown relatively fast over our first five years, so we’ve always been trying to squeeze a little bit more out of all of our resources.” By its fifth anniversary, it was time for Industrial Arts to move beyond the limitations of its original Garnerville facility. It expanded to a second facility in Beacon, NY, across the Hudson River, on the edge of town, where the brewer has turned an abandoned factory into a vibrant brewery campus. Instead of a 25 hL brewhouse, the Beacon location has a 100 hL brewhouse—a CombiCube from Krones Steinecker. It is a fully automated brewhouse capable of eight to 10 brews per day, depending on the wort gravity. And it’s had an immediate impact on Industrial Arts’ ability to get the most out of its raw materials and supply the market with its Wrench IPA and other brews. “We are seeing some increased efficiencies and some really wonderful yields out of the CombiCube,” says Mike McManus, director of brewing operations for Industrial Arts. “We built the CombiCube with Krones in order to cast out 100 hL with our flagship beer Wrench. But with every turn of Wrench, we’re getting a bit more than that. Yields have been excellent, and efficiencies have been as advertised or better.” “At this bigger scale—100 hL vs. 25—we are getting much more efficient extraction from our malt, we are getting much more hop utilization from our bigger boil, and we’re getting better yields out of the conical sedimentation tank we have rather than the traditional whirlpool,” O’Neil says. “We’re squeezing significantly more extract out of every bit of barley, wheat, oats, and hops that we put into the system.”
The Industrial Arts hazy IPA As a very hoppy, hazy IPA, the flagship Wrench presents some challenges in how the beer is made and thereby how the brewhouse is optimized.
| April 2022 | www.profoodworld.com
4/1/22 12:48 PM
